In their words the Thinstall technology – application virtualization – is:
“The Thinstall Virtualization Suite is a technology for virtualizing Windows software. Administrators do not have to install all applications on the workstation anymore – applications will be packed into a virtual environment, a sandbox, which contains all necessary information such as registry entries and applications’ DLL files. Now, the virtualized software can be started from every workstation. After the virtualization, there is no need for a local installation, because all program routines are emulated in the virtual environment.”

Simply said: you have whole software package packed into a single exe file and that’s it. It can run with standard user priviledges, you can run two versions together etc. All in all it mean no pollution of OS via sw package installation and no difficult upgrades and patches.

You want to deploy a new Firefox to workstations? Easy. Just copy one file using startup script into a local disk or – and that’s easier – just update server side repository of “thinstalled” programs (they call it application streaming) and push a link onto user’s START menu.

If you want to try it straight away go to http://www.thindownload.com/ where they offer “thinstalled” free licenced software for direct download. My favorite Opera browser is there together with Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, ICQ and even huge iTunes.

Not to forget to mention, they were able to “thinstallize” even Internet explorer, Office etc. Wow!

I’m gonna to discover its internals soon. It would be nice – no difficult GPO installs and updates … 🙂